Future Porn
There’s nothing wrong with pornography, but there’s a lot wrong with porn. Nothing wrong with watching people have sex, but too often that sex is brutal, senseless and coerced. I mean how many couples are coming on each others faces every day? Hence, philosopher king Alain de Botton – after calling for a new atheism, replete with temple – is now calling for a new pornography. One which is “fit for thoughtful, good human beings”. Good idea.
He said society is “awash with porn” which “represents a threat” both to the people who create it and to those who consume it, but he is convinced that it need not be that way and that people can be sexual and virtuous simultaneously.
Pornography as it is presented today is divorced from the values that people generally aspire to for their day-to-day lives, he says. To use pornography is to turn to a brutish and exploitative set of values that bear little relation to the “other concerns which a reasonably sensible, moral, kind and ambitious person might have”.
The Ancient Greeks, he said, understood that there was no need to have to choose between “being human and being sexual”, he said, and maintained that there should be no need to do so in the 21st century.
“Ideally, porn would excite our lusts in contexts which also presented other, elevated sides of human nature – in which people were being witty, for instance, or showing kindness, or working hard or being clever – so that our sexual excitement could bleed into, and enhance our respect for these other elements of a good life,” he said.
“No longer would sexuality have to be lumped together with stupidity, brutishness, earnestness and exploitation; it could instead be harnessed to what is noblest in us.” (The Independent)
Porn is super fucked up values wise, but it’s still an obvious human need and even joy. So porn of people that, like, seem to actually give a shit about each other would be nice. As Botton says, “As currently constituted, pornography asks that we leave behind our ethics, our aesthetic sense, and our intelligence when we contemplate it. Yet it is possible to conceive of a version of pornography which wouldn’t force us to make such a stark choice between sex and virtue – a pornography in which sexual desire would be invited to suppert, rather than to undermine, our higher values.”
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Hmm, maybe someday an indie film-maker will make an adorkable, quirky indie porno that’ll change the world. :D
Check out Zack and Miri Make a Porno- this is about as close as humanity’s ever going to get to an adorkable, quirky porno.
Well, if they brought in a hard-core element as was done in the old Caligula, it might have worked. As porn, Zack & Miri just wasn’t porn. Check out some of the European indie movies and you’ll find that element. I think Shame, or even TV mini-series like Spartacus and Game of Thrones are far closer to porn than Zack & Miri Make a Porno.